Hey, Mr. Zimmerman, play a song for me...

EVEN rock legends have unfulfilled fantasies, and Bob Dylan’s checking one off his list with brio on his new weekly XM Satellite Radio show. “Theme Time Radio Hour,” which premiered May 3, features the avowed radio hound guiding listeners through a thematically linked, predictably excellent dig into the roots of both his own music and the rock era he’s come to represent. Starting his inquiry into last week’s subject, weather, with bluesman Muddy Waters intoning “Blow, Wind Blow,” Dylan offered a rich and educational listen. Such obvious choices as the Staple Singers can share space with obscurities such as the Prisonaires, with nods toward Dylan peers Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Wonder.

And Dylan talks! The historically tight-lipped star, who’s loosened up since publishing his autobiography and participating in Martin Scorsese’s “American Masters” documentary, assumes the role of old-time broadcaster as if it were one of his cowboy stage costumes. This week’s show, pegged to Mother’s Day, runs from Randy Newman’s “Mama Told Me Not to Come” and Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried” to LL Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out” and Dirty Red’s “Mother Fuyer.”

Dylan will entertain e-mailed requests from listeners during future shows. We asked a selection of Times pop and non-pop critics, and Dylan fans, to comment on what they’d like to hear from DJ Bob.

*

Ann Powers

I’d like to hear him spin something by Prince. Maybe “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker” or, if he does a religious-themed show, “The Cross.” Dylan mentioned the Purple One -- in the same breath as Judy Garland -- in his first show, and these two native Minnesotans have a lot in common: huge ambition, strong egos, a unique vision of the American soundscape. Besides, Dylan’s been working a Prince look since at least 1989.

*

Richard Cromelin

Now that the ongoing demystifying process has reached new heights, let’s have Dylan lead a trip through his own memory lane, triggered by a spin of Bobby Vee’s first single, “Suzie Baby.” That record was on the radio in 1959 when Dylan landed a short-lived job playing piano in the teenage singer’s band in Fargo, N.D., and it would be enlightening to hear some reminiscence about Bob and Bobby. Did Bob really tell Bobby that he had played with Conway Twitty? Did he really use Elston Gunnn as a stage name? Why? Here’s a chance to make those distant, hazy North Country days a vivid part of the saga.

*

Randy Lewis

When Bruce Springsteen introduced “Old Dan Tucker” from his tradition-rooted “We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions” album in New Orleans last month, he described this mid-19th century folk rave-up as sounding “like a 150-year-old Bob Dylan tune.” I’d like to hear Dylan spin a version he might have heard in his youth and tell his listeners what it is about this tale of a man who “washed his face with a frying pan [and] combed his hair with a wagon wheel” that has kept it alive through the decades.

*

Lynell George

The Roots’ “Water,” from “Phrenology”: I think it might be fitting for Dylan to spin a cut from one of the most idiosyncratic hip-hop crews’ most idiosyncratic albums. The Roots, the “conscious rappers” with a message, distinguished themselves as an out-of-the-lines outfit who early on eschewed the rules: Their first album steered clear of samples; they’ve stubbornly kept showing up, on stage and on recordings, with something as archaic as actual instruments. “Water” is a devastating 10-minute trench-walk through the “gun clappin’ ” streets of South Philly, tailing former Roots MC Malik B.’s rise as “poet son” to his descent into drugs. The urgency is telegraphed through MC Black Thought’s reportorial delivery set against a thicket of “gaining-on-you” beats. All of it eventually collapses (in the cut’s second section, “The Abyss”), into a jumble of jagged instrumental fragments -- pieces that won’t fit back together. If this isn’t a young bard reciting a complicated hero’s tale, carrying the tradition that Dylan carried forward more forward still, I don’t know what is.

*

Christopher Knight

“You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” Sylvester (1978). The synthesized sheen of ‘70s disco is about the polar opposite of what the name “Dylan” says to me. Would the glossy surface and liberating erotic dance-pulse of Sylvester’s wonderful “You Make Me Feel” throw into high relief the distinctive brilliance of Dylan’s musical achievement? Or would it just make his head explode?

*

Lewis Segal

For a long time, Dylan gave voice to the side of things we weren’t used to hearing about: raw truths in a raw sound, anything but comfortable to listen to or think about. And his willingness to embrace a wide range of authentic American music (the folk-ballad tradition and later, country) was immensely influential in widening the perception of these pithy and often overlooked idioms. In terms of evoking the spirit of Dylan’s era and making a reference to his new DJ duties, how about both sides of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now”?

*

Mark Swed

It is hardly surprising that the conservative classical music establishment sweeps under the carpet the many once-modernist composers who turned to protest music. What a fine broom Mr. Dylan might make. He could start with Ruth Crawford Seeger, Pete’s stepmom, who wrote striking, ultramodern miniatures in the early ‘30s before devoting herself to transcribing American folk music. And no time is better than now to try to figure out Cornelius Cardew, the wild-and-wooly British avant-gardist who became radicalized, put politics before music and changed to an accessible style. He would have been 70 last Sunday had he not been suspiciously run over by a car and killed in 1981. Today’s Liszt of the left is Frederic Rzewski, who produces brilliant partially improvised piano music in support of workers.